Notch runs away from Psychonauts 2

Notch, the mastermind behind Minecraft, has become a bit of a cult figure in the video game industry and when he first mentioned that he may fund the development of Psychonauts 2 his stock skyrocketed.. but unfortunately Notch bit off far too much with this one.

Originally the excitement started with Notch stating

“All I know is that if the numbers work out and if they still want to do it and if they don’t decide to self-fund a sequel by doing more crowdfunding (which is honestly what I would’ve done if I were them), I would be most interested in doing this type of investment.”

But what Notch didn’t realise is how much it costs to make pretty much all games, except Minecraft.

In a reddit thread Notch has admitted that when he originally agreed to invest a couple of million he naively thought that meant $2 or $3 million…

“I somewhat naively thought ‘a couple of million’ was two million. I had no doubt in my mind that a Psychonauts 2 would earn that money back easily. Turns out they wanted 18 million dollars, haha. I don’t have the time at the moment to even try to get educated enough to make an 18 million dollar deal. Perhaps in some distant future when I’m no longer trying to make games, I could get into angel investing. I’ve made one private investment into a game so far, at $100K, and it’s frankly a lot more work than I thought.”

$18 million to make Psychonauts 2… I know the game has a cult following but that’s a massive leap of faith even for someone with over $100 million in the bank.